I have been spending the holidays with my fiance's family. All of them are die hard trump supporters. This town they live in, are all die hard trump supporters.
We went out to a restaurant with my fiance's parents and their friends. When it came time to pay their friends whipped out their cards and showed the table. Each card had a sticker delicately placed, the content of the stickers were of donald trump in many different contexts. Djt as a dollar bill, djt wearing a fake mustache at his mugshot, djt assasination attempt, etc. I was absolutely appalled. Then the waiter came over and I was expecting to see him perturbed as well. Nope. He wanted one and asked if they had anymore. They then gave him one and helped him put it on. In the middle of his shift.
Obviously trump is fucking disgusting in more ways than one. What baffles me is how you can flagrantly carry around a proven rapist in your wallet when you are a woman, not just a woman but a woman of color. Which the friend waving this dipshit around and making the stickers is.
I mean this man has literally talked about immigrants "poisoning the blood of this nation". These are actual fucking people he talks about and demonizes. People with families, lives, and friends. All that care just gets thrown out the window with these people.
I hate living in trump country, because I feel like I am losing my mind when everyone around me is flaunting him like their own son who graduated as validictorian. As if these people are part of his club. When he is one of the most disgusting individuals I have had the displeasure of hearing about for over 8 years going on 12 now. How can you be so ignorant? Every passing day in this state I understand more and more how Hitler gripped the minds of the masses and came into power so easily. People are so fucking stupid.
Please for my sanity, I need to talk to people who know this monster for who he truly is. How do you cope being in a similar situation? How do you speak up?
I’m going to post a great answer to this that agent_nycto shared on another thread:
I don't think you should be quiet, it makes them feel like everyone is agreeing with them and makes everyone miserable. Time to introduce you to my favorite game to play with conservatives, Politics Judo!
So you hear them rant about a thing. Some dumbass talking point. Let's use gun control. It's pretty easy to know in advance what the talking points are since they never shut up and parrot the same problem and solution over and over. "Shouldn't take guns, it's a mental problem not a gun problem".
Things are basically boiled down to a problem and a solution. A lot of people try to convince people that the problem isn't what people think it is, and that's hard to do. Even if they are just misinformed, it feels like trying to dismiss their fears.
So what you do is you agree with the problem, then use lefty talking points as the solution.
"Oh yeah, gun violence is pretty bad! And I love the Constitution, we shouldn't mess with that!" (Use small words and also throw in some patriotism, makes them feel like you're on their side. You want to sound like a right wing media con artist) "so instead of taking guns away, we should instead start having more, free, mental health care in this country. Since it's a mental health problem and these people are crazy, that is the solution that makes the most sense!" (Don't try to get them to agree to your solution, just state it as the obvious one)
It becomes weaponized cognitive dissonance. Their brains fry because you said the things you should to agree with them, flagged yourself as an ally, but then said the thing they were told is the bad and shouldn't want.
If they try to argue with your solution, rinse and repeat to a different talking point. "Oh yeah it might cost more, and we shouldn't have to pay more for it, so we should get the rich people who are screwing average hard working Americans over by not paying taxes to do that. We should shut down tax loopholes and increase funding to the IRS so they can go after them instead of the little guy"
Always sound like you're agreeing with them, but giving solutions that they disagree with that seem to be off topic but are related.
I've done exactly this, it works. You can see the partial stun on their face while they try to work it out.
Guy came over to get a thing off FB Marketplace, right after 01/06.
Him starting to get annoyed: "Hey. I saw what you posted on Neighborhood.com about January 6th. My brother's a cop."
"And those fuckers killed one cop, beat dozens of others and two suicided directly after! Fuck sakes, they were beating a cop with an American flag!" Fuck is wrong with these people! Why aren't cops shitting all over Trump!"
You could see the cognitive dissonance on his face, see him forming new thoughts. Pretty cool! And we parted very amicably.
On the taxes thing, I hit a (former) conservative friend with that when he was bitching about the IRS dunning him 2-years after filing.
"Well, yeah. The GOP has been slashing IRS funding for 2 decades. What do you expect? And why aren't these politicians going after the private firm you paid to screw up your taxes! Rebulicans should drop the hammer on fuckers like that instead of us working-class people getting fucked!"
We can do this all day.
"Fuckin' A I'm tired of illegals! Why the hell are the Republicans letting the employers slide on this shit! There would be no illegal immigration if they couldn't get jobs! Fuck me, I expect it from the Democrats, where's our guys?!"
This but with the slightly more moderate neoliberal pseudo-friend adjacent I have at university
It's important for them to see you as in-group. If they see you an an outsider they won't really listen to anything you say. That's something that afflicts all of us.
I unironically agree with this. We should fix underlying causes of violence--issues like systemic racism and misogyny, poverty, etc.--rather than focusing on the tools used for violence.
As do I. Plenty of countries have high gun ownership, but only we have such a plague of violence to go along with it. It obviously isn’t the guns—or not just the guns.
The devil of it is, we and conservatives often agree with the general scope of isssues and often our solutions are palatable to them… but since they’ve been taught that everything we do is anathema, they will automatically hate our ideas even if they agree with them. Obamacare is an excellent example of this.
The HCA has been a deeply imperfect attempt to solve a serious problem. Given the popularity of Brian Thompson's not-timely-enough demise across party lines, it's clear that people are not satisfied with it. Yes, it's better than what we had. But we've been fighting for 15 years to fix problems with the HCA, and IMO it's time to admit that the real issue is healthcare being treated as a way to make money.
True, but my point was more about how if you called it ‘Obamacare’ they hated it, but if you called the exact same thing the ‘affordable care act’ they liked it.
Good coping strategy - although it won't change anything it might make a person feel better.
You might not change the system this way, but if we all change a few people around us it makes a difference eventually.
Fucking brilliant, this.